Well before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the summary of its latest assessment of the physical science of global warming on Friday, experts worldwide were dealing with the fallout of the report.

That included explaining just why average global temperatures have done little in the past 15 years or so when they should have been increasing.

The IPCC, the peak body for the global warming industry, sets out what amounts to the agreed case for global warming in major reports issued every seven years.

These reports underpin a now vast industry in research grants, environment lobby firms and advisory businesses of all types.

The reports also provide the basis for billions of dollars in trading climate credits, many thousands of well-paid government jobs in climate bureaucracies, and an enormous green energy industry.

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The Australian Department of Climate Change alone, before it was merged with the Department of Industry earlier this year, turned over more than $120 million annually. The Australian Climate Commission, headed by
Tim Flannery
, had barely been killed off by the new Coalition government before it was reborn as the Climate Council, with crowdfunding that it now hopes will reach $500,000.

The IPCC report was never going to undermine the science on which all this funding floats, with the various leaked drafts of this key report remaining bullish on global warming. But early reports indicate that it will explain away the troublesome and widely acknowledged 15-year pause in temperatures as measured by the likes of the Hadley Centre in the UK.

There had been reports that concerned officials of various governments taking part in the collaborative process had urged the report editors not to include it. The full document, where there is more room to hide details due to its sheer size, is to be released later.

But the existence of the pause is now too widely known for any sleight of hand in the report so the IPCC and its band of supporters will be in damage control mode for some time.

For the laypersons among the policy makers and corporate donators may well ask: if average global surface temperatures are supposed to be increasing by anything between 2 and 6 degrees over a century, then why has there been no increase over the past decade and more?

Into the sea

With so much at stake, there have already been any number of articles published in print and on websites around the world explaining this “pause" and how the earth has actually continued to warm but the heat has instead gone into the oceans. Scientists have produced all sorts of ocean temperature measurement records to prove this point.

Another frequently mounted argument is that forecasts of global warming are over long periods and so, of course, there are bound to be major swings in the natural systems that are under measurement. The IPCC also apparently points to another long favoured explanation, that aerosols from pollution are masking the warming.

These explanations are defended not by the scientists but by a host of volunteer global warming enthusiasts who are only too ready to shout “denier" at anyone who may try to point out that detailed, high-resolution temperature measurements of the oceans for different depths are barely more than a decade old.

Those quibbles from a climate change sceptic aside, there is no doubt that scientists in the field are firmly convinced of these explanations and there is little an outsider can do to challenge this basic conviction beyond pointing to the work of the occasional sceptical scientist.

Anyone who has dealt with forecasts produced by experts with impressive credentials in any field, or who knows anything about the inglorious history of forecasting, would not be surprised by a forecast in such a young field being wrong in the short term. The idea is for scientists to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and take another look at the theory.

Climate scientists, however, cannot afford the luxury of admitting even a minor failure. A vast industry depends on the IPCC forecasts.

The problem of the apparent mismatch between models and forecasts, however, is made all the more acute by the fact models are being used to make detailed forecasts, such as those that predict the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere required to produce specific temperature increases. Those forecasts are supposed to dictate the extent by which emissions have to be cut.

The global warming industry will not be seriously hampered by any official acknowledgement of the pause by the IPCC or anyone else.

But to survive the industry needs temperatures to move upwards once more, as further claims the heat is going into the oceans will look like excuses, rather than explanations.